Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), the jacked, tattooed stud we meet in the kinky webcam routine that opens Elliot Tuttle's Blue Film is swaggering, flaunting his gym-honed body and humiliating his male followers with homophobic slurs.
From the running comments and lavish tips that fill his feed, it's clear they love his bullying. So, when one middle-aged viewer, Hank (Reed Birney) makes a startling offer — $50,000 for one night with the stud in Los Angeles — Aaron heads to a suburban Airbnb feeling fully in control.
His confidence takes a hit when Hank answers the door in a ski-mask, sets up a camera, and reveals that he knows Aaron's real name (Alex) and his hometown in Maine. Snatching off Hank's mask, the 20-something fetish camboy is startled to recognize the middle-school teacher he'd known as Mr. Grant, who has since spent seven years in prison for an attempted sexual assault on another boy. Alex was never Hank's victim, but at 12, he was an object of what Hank now disquietingly describes as "love."
As a sex worker who's accustomed to being objectified, Alex is perhaps less thrown by this revelation than movie audiences will be. Filmmaker Tuttle has set up a confrontation that will lead to a long night of soul searching and intermittent sex — an evening that's designed to be unsettling for audiences, but doesn't actually prove an easy sit for anyone, onscreen or off.
The two protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, the other a client-subjugating dom — don't invite easy sympathy, nor do they ask for it. Hank pairs a therapy-curated acknowledgment that his desires are morally abhorrent with an insistence that they are unchangeable. Alex maintains that his transactional sexuality, with its emphasis on humiliating clients, is somehow freeing and self-affirming.
In the course of a booze and drug fueled evening, both men's long-practiced defenses will be broken down, personal traumas coughed up, and self-images cross-examined. Audience attitudes are similarly interrogated, with knee-jerk revulsion challenged, and more nuanced responses encouraged at every turn.
Compelling performances — Birney's gooseflesh-inducing inquisitiveness as he seeks to engage his former student, countered by Moore's charismatic but vulnerable physicality — go a long way toward making this provocative two-hander as haunting as it is disquieting.
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